Film Reviews

Six year old Frida (Laia Artigas), recently orphaned after the death of her mother, is taken in by her uncle Esteve (David Verdaguer) and aunt Marga (Bruna Cusi), moving from her grandparents home to live with them and her three year old cousin Anna (Paula Robles). Given free rein by her relatives, Anna has fun over the summer, but, clearly traumatised by her mother’s death and by questions hanging over her own health, she also acts out. Films about childhood...

Jonathan Hacker’s documentary, Path of Blood, goes behind the curtain to reveal the inner machinations of Saudi Arabia’s Al-Qaeda factions circa the mid-2000s. An opening title sets the stage, re-illuminating anyone who may have forgotten to the fact that in the wake of 9/11 the world has seen the emergence and proliferation of Islamist extremist groups intent on destroying the West and establishing a global caliphate. We are then whipped into a sparse white room where a group of young...

Let’s face it, nobody has ever gone into a Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson action movie expecting a coherent plot or even a believable storyline, and to be frank this hasn’t stopped the actor from becoming one of the most bankable actions stars of the last decade. In the case of Skyscraper, Johnson’s latest vehicle, the stakes are stacked even higher than usual in this hugely enjoyable, if entirely preposterous heist movie which pits the former wrestling superstar against a group...

Marketed, rather predictably, as the next Full Monty (yes another one), Oliver Parker’s Swimming With Men is a charming, if utterly forgettable comedy that follows the adventures of an all-male synchronised swimming team of varying ages and backgrounds as they navigate their respective difficulties in life, albeit via the medium of swimming in formation. Loosely based on Dylan Williams’s 2010 documentary Men Who Swim, which told the real life story of middle-aged Swedish synchronised team, Swimming With Men stars Rob Brydon...

The First Purge’s marketing campaign caused a stir when it released a teaser trailer in the style of a political advertisement. It riffed on classic Republican adverts and baited Donald Trump’s base, with a narrator asking the question, “What makes America great? The answer's simple, really, Americans make America great. You are the lifeblood of the nation, and your rights as Americans must be safeguarded." As stock footage of a baseball team, farmland and a blonde haired, prepubescent boy waving...

I was too young for Whitney-mania ('I Will Always Love You' finished its streak at No.1 the week I was born), but to my generation also she is always known as a massively talented individual. She is engrained as a purveyor of 'legacy' music, a voice and a performer that rightly became instantaneously legendary. Whitney dives into the star's rise and fall, filmmaker Kevin Macdonald's experience of Touching The Void surprisingly relevant for this painful tale of both Whitney's undeniable talents...

There is something undeniably beautiful about the lush greenery that surrounds the Pacific Northwestern city of Portland. It is here in a large public park that Will (Ben Foster) and his teenage daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) live. Will is a war veteran who tries to escape the pressures of modern life and his PTSD through living in the wild. He is a very adept camper and they both live a comfortable existence in the woodlands. Perhaps inevitably, they are one...

Part-time sailor and full time wandering bum Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley) runs across rugged older man Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin) while moving through Tahiti. The pair hit it off, and after some happy years together find themselves alone on a boat crossing the Pacific from Tahiti to San Diego. Hurricane Raymond strikes, and what should've been a pleasant sail becomes a desperate attempt at survival. While Adrift hits the beats in a workmanlike manner there isn't enough separating this true...

Isabel Coixet adapts The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel of the same name, in her latest Goya award-winning film. Coixet crafts an interesting film, one that curiously marshals satisfaction and frustration.  Despite its predictability, it remains ambitious in its scope, and touches on subjects that feel both timely and important. It’s 1959.  The location, a nondescript British coastal town, dreary, stiflingly small and populated by narrow-minded, conservative townsfolk.  Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), a middle-aged widower whose husband was killed in the...